One use of a conventional optical delay line is to separate the particular colors of a chromatic spectrum. An array waveguide grating (AWG) can be useful for this purpose. To use such a grating for extremely high color resolution, the physical size of the AWG must be quite large. Such a size could easily exceed the size of a common silicon wafer. There is thus a need for an optical delay line that provides high color resolution but that is also compact. Such an optical delay line can enable a very high resolution AWG system (a hyper-resolution AWG).